If you include golf courses, lawns in America cover an area roughly the size of New York State and require 238 gallons of (usually drinking-quality) water per person, per day. According to the EPA, nearly a third of all residential water use in the US goes toward what is euphemistically known as “landscaping.”

We have become a nation of pawns with lawns. Food comes from the drive-thru, entertainment is televised, the concept of play exists on hand-held computers, democracy is a reality show every four years, and that tiny parcel of land we allegedly share with some bailed out bank is inevitably set aside to be a lawn.

As described by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, when it comes to lawns, social and ecological factors often work in coordination. “Perfection became a commodity of post-World War II prefabricated housing such as Levittown, NY, in the late 1940s,” writes Steinberg. “Mowing became a priority of the bylaws of such communities.”

Lawn mowers produce several types of pollutants, including ozone precursors, carbon dioxide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (classified as probable carcinogens by the CDC). In fact, operating a typical gasoline mower produces as much polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as driving a car roughly 95 miles. Since some folks are legally required to maintain a lawn (more about that shortly), here’s a suggestion or two: human-powered mowers or try using your bicycle.

Besides the air and noise pollution of mechanized mowers, there’s another form of toxicity directly related to America’s lawn addiction. “Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland,” writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community. “These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.”

“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,” wrote Rachel Carson almost five decades ago, “it is surely because our forefathers…could conceive of no such problem.”

We now produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did when Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. The EPA considers 30% of all insecticides, 60% of all herbicides, and 90% of all fungicides to be carcinogenic, yet Americans spend about $7 billion on 21,000 different pesticide products each year. “Prior to World War II, annual worldwide use of pesticides ran right around zero,” says author Derrick Jensen. “By now it’s 500 billion tons, increasing every year.” As a result, about 860 Americans suffer from pesticide poisoning every single day; that’s almost 315,000 cases per year.

As mentioned above, maintaining a noxious and unproductive lawn isn’t just a simple case of one-size-fits-all conformity in the face all logic and evidence; it’s often the law.

In October 2008, for example, Joseph Prudente of Beacon Woods, Florida, was sentenced to jail for failing to sod his lawn as required by the local homeowner covenants. Before you label Mr. Prudente a modern day insurrectionist, take note that the reason he failed to live up to his suburban obligation was predictable: he couldn’t afford to replace his sprinklers when they broke. “It’s a sad situation,” said Bob Ryan, Beacon Woods Homeowners Association board president. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”

I’m guessing Mr. Ryan has never heard of Food Not Lawns.

Imagine, as the folks at Food Not Lawns do, each house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic “Victory” garden from which the family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their own. Or perhaps you’d like to imagine them engaging in some green graffiti and/or seed bombing.

(For the uninitiated, seed bombs are “compressed balls of soil and compost that have been impregnated with wildflower seeds. Jettisoned onto barren, abandoned, or otherwise inhospitable land, including construction sites and abandoned lots.” Liz Christy—who started the “Green Guerillas” in 1973—coined the alternative term, seed grenades. Smaller versions are commonly called seed balls. No matter what you call them, seed bombs are part of the ever-increasing international trend of guerilla gardening and you can find kindred spirits here.)

“The vast expanse of forever-green American lawn is not only the most resource intensive agricultural crop in the world,” writes Tobias Policha in Green Anarchy, “but also an obscene icon to our arrogant privilege and total alienation from a life in harmony with nature.”

The sterile lawn—complete with its requisite sprinkler, chemical cocktail, bug zapper, and “keep off the grass” sign—is an ideal symbol for America’s cookie cutter culture. Lawns, writes Ted Steinberg, are “an instrument of planned homogeneity.” He asks: “What better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”

To which we must reply: Fuck homogeneity and fuck conformity.

Why don’t more people step away from the coast-to-coast mall mentality? Once reason is the looming Green Scare, a term which refers to “the federal government’s expanding prosecution efforts against animal liberation and ecological activists, drawing parallels to the “Red Scares” of the 1910’s and 1950s.”

The answer to this tactic, as always, is more solidarity. More of us need to embrace ideas like dumpster diving, off the grid living, wwoofing, billboard liberation, monkey wrenching, radical love, bartering, freeganism, veganism, transition towns, and other forms of the DIY ethic. We need organic vegetable gardens, not lawns. We need two wheels, not four. We need food not bombs. We need immediate courageous collective direct action, not “hope and change.” We need comrades, not pawns with lawns. And we need it all now.

Mickey Z. has lived in apartments his entire life but can also be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

It was a vision of Armageddon, but, of course, 10 days later, the House rejected a Wall Street bailout package sent over by Paulson, only to pass one in a more limited form—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act—a week later that gave Paulson less power and only half the money he wanted.

Meanwhile, the financial system did not collapse and while a few banks were failing, there were no runs on them, and martial law wasn’t invoked. One reason things didn’t fall apart when Congress didn’t immediately act as Paulson and Bernanke demanded, may be that there wasn’t any danger of a meltdown in the first place.

So say three senior economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who in October examined the Fed’s own data, and concluded in an article titled Facts and Myths About the Financial Crisis of 2008 that the claims that interbank lending and commercial lending had seized up were simply not true.

“Bank lending to consumers and to non-financial companies had not ceased, and banks were lending to each other at record levels,” says V.V. Charri, an economist at the Minneapolis Fed. “Maybe Bernanke and Paulson had information that they were not making public, but the available data simply did not support what they were saying.”

Charri and his colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Christiano and Patrick Kehoe agree that with companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citigroup foundering because of toxic debt instruments, there was a sense of a financial crisis brewing, but they say it wasn’t a credit freeze. “This was a lot like the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003,” says Charri. “You had people in government saying: `We’re smart guys, trust us.’ But they were either wrong or they were lying.”

Adds Kehoe: “Normally, when you’re going to spend a lot of money, you present the data and the economic theory to support it, yet here’s the biggest non-military government intervention in history since the Great Depression, and there was no evidence presented to support it, and no detailed economic argument made about what market failures this $700 billion was going to fix.”

For the rest of this article, go to Treasury and Risk magazine

The Republican Party can no longer survive in a modern era if we resist this new reality. With our power in Washington waning, our grassroots are the source of our greatest strength — not a problem to be managed. To revitalize ourselves, we must invite the crowd back in and tap their energy and creativity.

This group is trying to repair the severe damage brought by the policies and behaviors of the Bush Administration and sadly endorsed by the Party faithful.

As of late I have been writing incessantly about the need to punish this Republican Party. In fact I have advocated its demise. My stated reason has been that there must be a punishment for the immoral, unethical, corruptive behavior of the GOP over the last eight years. And their behavior has earned them the right to be consigned to the dust bin of history and left to become irrelevant, represented only as a “once was” item in History books.

Watching C-Span this morning, I witnessed one Mindy Finn speak about the health of the Republican Party. Now Mindy is a die hard Republican and is wanting to save her GOP from suffering the fate that I reported in the opening sentence of this article was a Republican Party Management concern. Mindy is a co-founder of “Rebuild the Party” and her organization has put forward a 10 point action plan to ressurect the Party from certain oblivion. My point is that even the inner circle Republicans believe that they are headed for history’s dust bin if they don’t change.

But as is always the case, the Devil is in the details. As I listened and watched C-Span closely waiting for someone to call in and say “You need to get the Party to realize that they need to respond to the voice of the people”, alas no such call came. One soul did call in and speak of the need for the Party to get rid of the Neo-Cons, a must in my opinion, but the response to that caller was minimal at best and I considered it to be – ignored. The Republican Upper Management attitude is best illustrated by what Gary Eminith, elected as the North Dakota Republican Party Chairman in July, had to say in December about responding to the public : “ At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the public thinks; it matters what 168 of us think”. The 168 he was alluding to is the upper echelon management of the Party. So Ms. Finn joined in to save the party from those that Eminith was alluding to, the Conservative status-quo. Eminith wants to rebuild the party also, but he wants a different method of electing the RNC chairman. In other words a structure change, nothing to do with Party behavior toward the public.

The Rebuildtheparty.com of Ms. Finn and her signers-on have come up with “A 10-point action plan” . This plan is best understood by what was written by the framers of that Ten Point Plan as quoted here: In Ms. Finn’s words, “We need a transformation.” And she suggested that the Party steal Obama’s phrase “Yes we can.”

Sounds like her faction of the Republican Party is trying to make amends, wouldn’t you think? Well that just might be an illusion.

As Ms. Finn discussed the 10-point plan with the C-Span moderator, Pedro Echevarria, I noticed that the most important words, or as I use them – behaviors, were never mentioned: Morality of Governance, Ethical Governance, and Fidelity to the people. Those three words Morals, Ethics, Fidelity, should be the frame for all of America and was heavily prominent as the bedrock foundation for the construction of the Constitution by our Founding Fathers.

But, well I thought, in a talk show things can be omitted due to the constraints of time, and of course the subject response is driven by the callers-in. So to really see what is contained in the rebuilding effort, I went online and visited the site, and read the 10 Point Action Plan. It is my sad duty to report that most of the plan is how to rebuild the Republican Party structure, and how to get the Republican message out. The most important words from my perspective, needed to discuss the remaking of the Republican Party; Morality of Governance, Ethical Governance, and Fidelity to the People, just wasn’t mentioned.

So the rebuilding effort ignores the very things that have brought great dishonor to the Party. Saying “Yes we can” doesn’t effect change. Change comes from within, whether it be from within an individual, or from within a Political Party. Ms. Finn, you and your Republicans MUST change the Party behavior to remain a viable political party.

Once again I call for the end of this existing Republican Party. I will never vote for a candidate from this Republican Party again.